Wednesday, February 8, 2012

In the summer of 2006 Manchester United were written off. Chelsea had just won the league with ease and added one of the best players in the world for each position to their squad. Ashley Cole, Michael Ballack and Andriy Shevchenko joined them, whilst in contrast we sold our top scorer, Ruud van Nistelrooy, and didn’t replace him, and brought in Michael Carrick, who was hardly the midfield general the fans had been hoping for.

2006/2007 turned out to be a brilliant season for United though, with us winning the league, reaching the Champions League semi-finals and FA Cup final. It wasn’t just our success of that season though, winning our first title since 2003, but the individual moments and games along the way. What a season.

Ole Gunnar Solskjaer

In Solskjaer’s second game of the 2006/2007 season, he scored an injury time goal against Charlton. He had played in just three league games the season before, one in December, one in April and one in May. He didn’t play at all during the season before that. Time and again it looked as though his playing career was over, yet here he was scoring goals for us again.

His best moment of the same came against Aston Villa in the Cup. After we took the lead, they pulled a goal back with 15 minutes to go. With a replay hanging over us, up popped Solskjaer to score the winner in injury time.

ATLANTA: Nine out of 10 American adults consume too much salt and the leading culprit is not potato chips or popcorn but slices of bread and dinner rolls, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Tuesday.

Forty-four percent of salt consumed can be linked to 10 types of foods, CDC said. Bread and rolls lead the list followed by cold cuts and cured meat, pizza, poultry, soups, sandwiches, cheese, pasta dishes, meat dishes and snacks such as pretzels and potato chips.

Bread may not have much salt in a single serving, but when eaten several times a day can raise daily salt intake. A single slice of white bread could contain as many as 230 milligrams of salt, according to the CDC.

Let's start with red lines. Here it is, Washington's ultimate red line, straight from the lion's mouth. Only last week Secretary of Defence Leon Panetta said of the Iranians: "Are they trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No. But we know that they're trying to develop a nuclear capability. And that's what concerns us. And our red line to Iran is do not develop a nuclear weapon. That's a red line for us."

How strange, the way those red lines continue to retreat. Once upon a time, the red line for Washington was "enrichment" of uranium. Now, it's evidently an actual nuclear weapon that can be brandished.

Keep in mind that, since 2005, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei has stressed that his country is not seeking to build a nuclear weapon. The most recent National Intelligence Estimate on Iran from the US Intelligence Community has similarly stressed that Iran is not, in fact, developing a nuclear weapon (as opposed to the breakout capacity to build one someday).

What if, however, there is no "red line", but something completely different? Call it the petrodollar line.